Timbre at the Crossroads

In this seminar, we will explore how the idea of “timbre” is constructed across diverse disciplinary frames, including music research, composition, sound studies, media history, psychoacoustics, and the information sciences. Our emphasis here on cross- disciplinarity reflects timbre’s status as a multivalent sonic parameter that is notoriously difficult to define, and which has been theorized according to varying interpretive logics in different historical epochs. Today, it is often defined negatively as the characteristic quality of sound that is neither pitch nor loudness, and which allows listeners to distinguish two instruments playing the same note. But this definition only takes us so far, provoking more questions than answers: what exactly is timbre? What are its physical correlates and how do these features map onto auditory perception? What can such matters of scientific fact tell us about how timbre conveys meaning as an expressive musical element? And what might we gain by considering timbre through alternative lenses of embodiment, semantics, affect, and cultural identity?